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11:17 PM
WASHINGTON — It was not quite the Tony Blair-Bill Clinton love fest of 1997, but President Obama and the newly minted British prime minister, David Cameron, appeared game to do everything they could on Tuesday to take some of the recent chill out of the relationship between their countries.
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Standing side by side in near-identical dark blue suits and blue ties in the East Room at the conclusion of Mr. Cameron’s first visit to the White House as his nation’s leader, the two fortysomethings systematically papered over the few areas of daylight between the United States and Britain (stimulus spending versus deficit reduction, the pace of withdrawal from Afghanistan, the need for an inquiry into the release by Scotland of the only person convicted in the Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie).
Instead, before the assembled press corps of Washington and Downing Street, they joked about cold beer versus warm beer, whether their children kept their bedrooms tidy and the England-United States World Cup soccer match that ended in a tie.
“While at the World Cup our teams could only manage a score draw, I believe our relationship can be a win-win,” Mr. Cameron said, neglecting to mention that the United States still managed to emerge the winner, over England, of its World Cup group.
Even on one of the main areas of substantive disagreement — the release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence agent who had served eight years of a life sentence for his role in the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland — the two seemed determined to project the impression of being in lock step.
But Mr. Cameron, who as leader of Britain’s opposition at the time had objected to the release, said that he did not see any point to an additional investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Megrahi’s release, an investigation that Mr. Obama supports.
“I don’t need an inquiry to tell me it was a bad decision,” Mr. Cameron said. “It was a bad decision.”
Mr. Cameron also said he had no reason to believe that BP had anything to do with the much criticized decision to release Mr. Megrahi from a Scottish prison last year to win oil concessions from Libya.
He and Mr. Obama both strongly condemned the release, which the Scottish government decided on compassionate grounds after doctors there testified that Mr. Megrahi was likely to die of advanced prostate cancer within three months. He is still alive and living in Tripoli, Libya.
“It was the biggest mass murder in British history, and there was no business letting him out of prison,” Mr. Cameron said, adding that he and Mr. Obama were in “violent agreement” on that.
The first formal visit between an American president and a British prime minister is always fraught with historical significance. The two Western powers make much of their vaunted “special relationship,” which Mr. Obama, who never seemed to warm to Mr. Cameron’s predecessor, Gordon Brown, mentioned twice during the news conference; Mr. Cameron once.
In this case, not only is Mr. Cameron new to his job, but as leader of the Conservative Party, he is ideologically more distant from Mr. Obama than was Mr. Brown, who was leader of the Labour Party.
Britain’s press pays a lot of attention to every facet of how its prime ministers are treated by American presidents; any slight, real or imagined, is examined, as Mr. Obama learned last year. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, had to step in to quell an uproar in the British press over the White House’s rejection of five requests from the British for a meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Brown last September. (“Stop reading those London tabloids,” Mr. Gibbs said, insisting that the White House turned down the requests because Mr. Obama and Mr. Brown talked all the time.)
Mr. Cameron’s first visit to Washington as prime minister was meant as a way for he and Mr. Obama to tackle a series of issues vital to the two countries, in particular the war in Afghanistan and steps toward a global economic recovery. But the BP oil spill, and a decision by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings on July 29 on Mr. Megrahi’s release, dominated the joint news conference after the White House meetings.
Lawmakers who pressed for the Washington hearing on the release — including the senators from New York, New Jersey and California, home states to many of the 189 American bombing victims at Lockerbie — have demanded that BP explain its role in lobbying for the prisoner-transfer agreement Britain and Libya concluded in December 2007. The senators have said they want to explore possible links between Mr. Megrahi’s release and BP’s eagerness to win Libyan ratification of an offshore oil deal that company officials have said could be worth $20 billion.
Brian Knowlton contributed reporting from Washington and John F. Burns from London.
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11:16 PM
BEIJING — Mao slept here. So, too, did the imperial eunuchs who found themselves unemployed after China’s last emperor was sent packing. For much of the last 700 years, however, the most prominent residents of the quarter just north of the Forbidden City have been a pair of massive brick towers whose drums and bells helped Beijing’s citizenry keep track of the hour.
These days, those who reside in the neighborhood known as Gulou are anxiously counting the days until construction crews begin turning its 32 charmingly decrepit acres into a polished tourist attraction called Beijing Time Cultural City.
Anchored by the ancient Drum and Bell Towers, the $73 million redevelopment will include courtyard homes for the rich, a “timekeeping” museum and an underground mall, presumably well stocked with Rolexes and Cartiers — or perhaps their more affordable counterfeit cousins.
Since the project was announced in January, historians have been sounding the alarm. So, too, have the expatriates who cherish the area’s old Beijing authenticity. “When they’re done, the place is going to look like Universal Studios,” said Robin Foo, a Brunei-born Chinese architect who has spent the last six years turning a local Yuan dynasty temple into a swank cafe and catering hall.
But the outrage is harder to find among the thousands of poor families who live in the ramshackle collection of gray brick houses topped with wavy roof tiles. “Tear the whole place down,” said Zhou Meihua, 72, who shares a 20-square-foot pair of rooms with three generations of family members. “If we get enough compensation, we’ll happily move out.”
Government officials tend to stoke such sentiments by failing to update old neighborhoods in a way that preserves their existing fabric.
Instead, they seize property in parts of the city they deem “unhygienic and unsafe,” rezone much of it as commercial property and sell it for huge profits. The concession to history often consists of a few new buildings with upturned eaves and garishly painted timber slapped on concrete facades.
Local officials often claim that the need to renew old areas requires their destruction, critics say. Over the past two months, a huge section of old homes just north of Gulou was bulldozed to make way for the construction of a nearby subway station.
“This is not about preserving a historic monument. It’s about saving a living, breathing community that has evolved organically over hundreds of years,” said Yao Yuan, a Peking University professor who specializes in urban planning.
For preservationists, the challenge is to convince local power brokers that there is still money to be made by modernizing old single-story homes, block by block, and then allowing some of the original residents — and their old Beijing ways — to remain. Keep the charm, they say, and the tourists and tax revenue will follow.
For He Shuzhong, a lawyer who runs the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, that means bringing up his favorite analogy about a tattered Ming dynasty chair that would have immense value if spruced up.
One can easily toss away the chair and buy a plastic one, he tells poker-faced officials, but if it were repaired and cleaned, the Ming chair would be worth 10,000 plastic chairs. “It’s the same thing for these old neighborhoods,” Mr. He said, gesticulating with urgency. “They are our unique heritage that cannot be replaced.”
So far, such arguments have had limited impact on this redevelopment-crazed city. In recent years, two-thirds of Beijing’s 3,000 narrow lanes, known as hutongs, have been subsumed by mega-developments, many of them in neighborhoods that were officially designated preservation zones.
Government-affiliated builders either ignore the law or use words like “historic” and “restoration” to describe patently new construction. Critics say the most egregious example of this trend can be seen just south of Tiananmen Square, where the city’s most fabled shopping district, Qianmen, was replaced by a soulless but expensive facsimile of its former hurly-burly self.
“The renovation of Qianmen wasn’t about preserving history, but about creating a fake Hollywood version of it,” said Mr. Yao, the urban planning professor
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11:16 PM
BANDIPORE, Kashmir — In this high Himalayan valley on the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir, the latest battle line between India and Pakistan has been drawn.
Laborers who work long hours in Bandipore said the work is not merely a matter of electricity. National pride is at stake, they said.
This time it is not the ground underfoot, which has been disputed since the bloody partition of British India in 1947, but the water hurtling from mountain glaciers to parched farmers’ fields in Pakistan’s agricultural heartland.
Indian workers here are racing to build an expensive hydroelectric dam in a remote valley near here, one of several India plans to build over the next decade to feed its rapidly growing but power-starved economy.
In Pakistan, the project raises fears that India, its archrival and the upriver nation, would have the power to manipulate the water flowing to its agriculture industry — a quarter of its economy and employer of half its population. In May it filed a case with the international arbitration court to stop it.
Water has become a growing source of tension in many parts of the world between nations striving for growth. Several African countries are arguing over water rights to the Nile. Israel and Jordan have competing claims to the Jordan River. Across the Himalayas, China’s own dam projects have piqued India, a rival for regional, and even global, power.
But the fight here is adding a new layer of volatility at a critical moment to one of the most fraught relationships anywhere, one between deeply distrustful, nuclear-armed nations who have already fought three wars.
The dispute threatens to upset delicate negotiations to renew peace talks, on hold since Pakistani militants killed at least 163 people in attacks in Mumbai, India, in November 2008. The United States has been particularly keen to ease tensions so that Pakistan can divert troops and matériel from its border with India to its frontier with Afghanistan to fight Taliban insurgents.
Anti-India nationalists and militant networks in Pakistan, already dangerously potent, have seized on the issue as a new source of rage to perpetuate 60 years of antagonism.
Jamaat-u-Dawa, the charity wing of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the Mumbai attacks, has retooled its public relations effort around the water dispute, where it was once focused almost entirely on land claims to Kashmir. Hafiz Saeed, Jamaat’s leader, now uses the dispute in his Friday sermons to whip up fresh hatreds.
With their populations rapidly expanding, water is critical to both nations. Pakistan contains the world’s largest contiguous irrigation system, water experts say. It has also become an increasingly fertile recruiting ground for militant groups, who play on a lack of opportunity and abundant anti-India sentiment. The rivers that traverse Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province and the heart of its agriculture industry, are the country’s lifeline, and the dispute over their use goes to the heart of its fears about its larger, stronger neighbor.
For India, the hydroprojects are vital to harnessing Himalayan water to fill in the serious energy shortfalls that crimp its economy. About 40 percent of India’s population is off the power grid, and lack of electricity has hampered industry. The Kishenganga project is a crucial part of India’s plans to close that gap.
The Indian project has been on the drawing board for decades, and it falls under a 50-year-old treaty that divides the Indus River and its tributaries between both countries. “The treaty worked well in the past, mostly because the Indians weren’t building anything,” said John Briscoe, an expert on South Asia’s water issues at Harvard University. “This is a completely different ballgame. Now there’s a whole battery of these hydroprojects.”
The treaty, the result of a decade of painstaking negotiation that ended in 1960, gave Pakistan 80 percent of the waters in the Indus River system, a ratio that nationalists in Pakistan often forget. India, the upriver nation, is permitted to use some of the water for farming, drinking and power generation, as long as it does not store too much.
While the Kishenganga dam is allowed under the treaty, the dispute is over how it should be built and the timely release of water. Pakistan contends that having the drainage at the very base of the dam will allow India to manipulate the water flow when it wants, for example, during a crucial period of a planting season.
“It makes Pakistan very vulnerable,” said a lawyer who has worked on past water cases for Pakistan. “You can’t just tell us, ‘Hey, you should trust us.’ We don’t. That’s why we have a treaty.”
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11:15 PM
LOS ANGELES — It was the most painful sort of ordinary.
At Mary Alexander’s home is a picture of her daughter, Alicia, who was 18 in 1988 when she was found dead in an alley.
One summer day in 1985, a woman turned up dead in a South Los Angeles alleyway. Almost exactly a year later, another woman with fatal bullet wounds was found, in another alley nearby. And so it went, for nearly 25 years — with a 13-year lull in which the killings seemed to stop — black women, many of whose struggles with drugs had worried or alienated their families, were found dead and discarded around the streets and alleyways of South Los Angeles.
Their killings went unsolved in part because of a lack of witnesses and evidence, but also because Los Angeles County — and particularly the beleaguered corridors south of the 10 Freeway — endured so many murders, some at the hands of other serial killers, it took a long time to confirm that 10 women and one man were killed by the “Grim Sleeper,” so called for his supposed killing hiatus.
“Bodies accumulated,” said Detective Clifford Shepard, who has worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for more than 25 years. “You just didn’t have any information back then. It was an insane time.”
Lonnie David Franklin Jr., a mechanic and auto thief who lived among the victims for all those years, was arrested this month after almost a quarter-century of brutality, linked to the killings through a sophisticated use of DNA analysis.
Most of the victims’ bodies were found within two miles of Mr. Franklin’s home in a fairly circumscribed section of South Los Angeles near the 110 and 105 Freeways. Some were dumped along quiet stretches of south Western Avenue, where single-story homes sit next to ramshackle motels, auto body shops and a park. Others lay in the alleys that cut through residential blocks on either side of Western’s commercial strip, an area dotted with fast food restaurants, liquor stores, and churches big and small.
In many ways, the case sums up the long and painful history of a neighborhood where drug crimes, gang violence and an uneasy relationship with the police combined to hinder the arrest of Mr. Franklin, and contributed to the demise of women whose footing in their community was so unsure, there were few left behind to rage for justice. Most were unaware until recently then that their loved one’s killer had taken other lives.
“I didn’t know about other murders,” said Betty Lowe, the mother of Mary Lowe, the sixth victim. “When the detective was assigned to the case I called practically every day and every day they told me, ‘Nothing yet,’ so I thought it was never going to happen for us.”
While South Los Angeles remains one of the more troubled areas of the city, the arrest of Mr. Franklin also illuminates in many ways how far it has come, both through the vast reduction in violence and the evolution of law enforcement technology and tactics.
“The Grim Sleeper case spans all of that history of South L.A.,” said Joe Hicks, vice president of Community Advocates Inc., who grew up in South Los Angeles. “His activity began in a period of Los Angeles when things were dramatically different, and particularly in the neighborhoods where he operated, and it wasn’t unusual to find bodies in the alleys.
“But the way things have changed over the course of years, the ways the later victims were dealt with, the interaction between the police and community, the way that people in the neighborhood decided we are not going to tolerate” crime and violence among young people, he added. “You superimpose the Grim Sleeper on that, and it is very interesting.”
The 1980s and 1990s, when crack use was widespread, marked a time of intense violence in urban America. There were more than 800 people killed in Los Angeles every year but two from 1985 to 1995. By comparison, 314 people were killed here in 2009.
When the first victim, Debra Jackson, 29, turned up dead, the police were already trying to grapple with other killers who preyed on women, largely women who traded sex for drugs — known as strawberries — in South Los Angeles. A South Side Slayer task force, named for another suspected killer or killers of women, was assigned to unravel the murders.
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